Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World

Does an Accent Make You Seem Native?
I think people should examine why they want to reduce their accents. The
benefits of blending in with people from another country are not just about
having no accent, but about being confused for a native speaker. These are
two very different worlds.
I’ll discuss accent reduction shortly, but even if you have an accent, you
can still get confused for a native speaker. And being confused for a native
speaker isn’t just about sounding like one, but acting like one.
I go out of my way to emulate the clothing sense, body language,
distance between speakers, facial expressions, the topics I discuss, and all
things related to what native speakers would do, rather than just how they
would say something. This requires paying attention to customs, looking at
what people are doing, and picking up on these things.
While this is, of course, much harder to do when you are in a place
where skin color makes you stand out, I don’t think you should give up

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hope. Many countries are much more multiethnic than you may think, and it
is easier to blend in. Even in an extreme case, like China, which has a very
tiny amount of non-Asian immigration, people have confused me for an
English teacher who has lived in China for years, based on a combination of
my speaking Mandarin and standing out less by acting more Chinese.
Walk Like an Egyptian
For instance, when I arrived in Egypt with the beginnings of B1 level
spoken Arabic, I found that people would still talk to me in English, before
I even said anything. So improving my Arabic clearly wasn’t the issue here.
Many might say that my skin color makes it impossible to blend in, but this
isn’t entirely true; it’s not about blending in perfectly, but standing out less.
Major cities like Cairo actually do have white Egyptians, but the trick is to
not look like a white tourist.
So I took the time to sit down at a café where many people were passing
by and, with a notepad, really paid attention to what was different between
them and me from a purely visual perspective. I noticed that Egyptian males
around my age (at least in Cairo) tended to have mustaches and they
definitely didn’t wear the kind of lightweight clothes I preferred in that hot
weather, but instead wore sweaters, long pants, and dark shoes. They also
walked pretty confidently and were much more likely to be talking on their
cell phones while crossing a busy street with high-speed traffic coming at
them. I also noticed they were less likely to wear hats.
I got rid of my cap, started wearing a sweater over my T-shirt, and as
much as I really wanted to wear my comfortable bright-yellow sneakers, I
put on cheap, dull, black shoes I found in a local market instead. I also let a
mustache grow out and maintained some stubble to look more like Egyptian
men my own age.
The way people first treated me after this transformation was incredible!
Even though I am definitely Irish and as white as you’d expect any Irish
guy to be, people always started speaking Arabic to me when I entered a
store, including in highly touristed areas where they spoke very good
English, or they would continue in Arabic after I asked a question.
Something about my outward appearance helped keep the conversation in
the right language.

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I am convinced that this outward appearance and body language are as
essential as the things I mentioned in the previous chapter when reasoning
why some locals may feel inclined to switch back to English. When you
look like a tourist, there is a certain subconscious thought process
screaming at them to speak English with you, even if you are audibly doing
great in their language.